A Book of Great Worth (17 page)

“Hardly famous,” my father said, surprised to find himself blushing. He offered his hand to the woman, as he had to the dark-haired woman he had met at the dance, but she lowered her eyes shyly and held up the stirring spoon by way of excuse. The aroma of cooking onions brought saliva flooding to his tongue.

“Famous enough,” Reuben said, “and certainly our benefactor.”

After the usual pleasantries, the two men retired to the shabby living room, its furniture threadbare and sprung, while the cousin’s wife returned to her cooking. The walls were bare of decoration, there was no telephone and there were no toys or articles of children’s clothing littering the floor. A bottle of whisky, rye cheaper than my father would ever buy, was produced, and Reuben, who was tieless and in shirtsleeves, poured shots for my father and himself.

“
L’chaim
,” he said, raising his glass.

“
L’chaim
,” my father repeated, glancing around the dimly lit room.

Through the meal that followed, served on a cloth-covered table in the warm, humid kitchen, there was no sign of and no mention of the couple’s child. The furrier job that my father had helped his cousin find had not turned out well and he was again unemployed, but the table conversation was light, filled with talk of the looming strike in the garment trade and anecdotes of life in Montreal, which seemed not all that unlike New York. These latter were related by Reuben in English, in an accent my father realized was as much influenced by French as by Yiddish. The wine he’d brought went well with the fatty pot roast with potatoes and onions Rachel had prepared, which she served with a salad of wilted lettuce and onions tossed with sweetened vinegar, and slices of dark bread, still warm from the oven. Rachel contributed little to the conversation, but she followed it closely with an alert pair of eyes that were a startling shade of green, and, as the meal progressed, her shyness seemed to fade, and she favoured my father several times with a bold, direct glance that, had she not been married, and had he not been interested in the woman he’d met at the dance, would have thrilled him.

“An excellent meal,” my father said, finishing his wine and placing a hand over his glass as Reuben proffered the bottle, a few more mouthfuls remaining in the bottom. “I’m curious, Rachel. How is it that your child is so well behaved? When I visit my brother Izzy, his children are all over me. I haven’t heard a peep from yours all evening. You have a little girl or a little boy?”

Rachel seemed momentarily confused by my fa
ther’s question, her face reddening, and her husband quickly interjected: “Oh, our son is with a neighbour. Just for the evening. Yes, we have a son. He’s our pride, but he’s no better behaved than your brother’s children, of that I can assure you. When we have company, we find it’s better to have the boy elsewhere.”

There was a look in his cousin’s eye that immediately recalled for my father Vogel’s comment the night they’d met Reuben at the Automat, and for the first time he felt he knew what his friend had meant. He’d already assumed it would be a long time before he saw his fifty dollars again, but that didn’t particularly concern him.

“I didn’t mean that I minded my nephew and niece,” my father said, turning to his cousin’s wife, who was gathering up plates.

“No, no, I understand,” Reuben said. “But adult talk is better left to adults, don’t you agree? Perhaps the next time you honour us with your company.”

Rachel served coffee to the two men,
who took their cracked and chipped cups and saucers into the
living room. No milk or sugar was offered, and my fa
ther,
sitting in an uncomfortable easy chair, thought better than to request them. The sounds of Rachel moving about the kitchen, pouring a bucket of water heated on the stove into the sink, scraping dishes, punctuated the silence that fell on the room as they sipped the bitter coffee.

“We’ll have to do something about finding you an
other job,” my father said eventually.

“That’s not necessary, Morgenstern. I have prospects of my own.”

“As you wish.”

“If it’s the money I owe you...”

My father held up a hand. “Believe me, Reuben, that’s the farthest thought from my mind.”

“Not from mine, I can assure you.”

The cousin got up and went to the kitchen door, whispering a few words to his wife in what my father took to be French. When he turned back to his guest, he was rolling down his sleeves and buttoning them. “If you’ll excuse me, Morgenstern, I have an appointment right now to speak to a man about a job.”

My father, taken by surprise, started to rise but his cousin waved him back into his chair. “Don’t go, please. I won’t be long. Finish your coffee, at least. Honour my wife with your company.”

“If you put it that way, how can I refuse?” my father said, smiling.

Reuben slipped on his suit jacket, its elbows shiny, took the distinctive overcoat with the red stripe from the same doorless closet my father’s coat and hat had disappeared into, and, without a further word, left the apartment.

My father, uncertain as to what was expected of him, took a sip of his coffee, then set the cup and saucer down on a rickety coffee table, which was otherwise bare. On an impulse, he rose and strode to the room’s one window, which looked out on the deserted street three floors below, lit by the yellow glow of a street lamp, but, even after several minutes, there was no sign of his cousin emerging from the building. Gradually, he became aware that the sounds from the kitchen had ceased, and that he was not alone in the room.

He turned, smiling, starting to speak, “Ah, Rachel,” but he was silenced by what he saw. His hostess stood in the kitchen doorway, completely naked, her long blonde hair loosened, her green-eyed gaze directly on him, like a challenge.

“The bedroom’s through that way,” she said after a moment, nodding her head to the left. “Reuben won’t be back for awhile.”

My father’s eyes fastened on the woman’s breasts for a moment, then he tore them away. “What, are you crazy?” he demanded.

“I’m not crazy.”

“No? What are you then, if not crazy?”

Rachel gave my father a steady gaze that all but buckled his knees. But neither his will nor his legs faltered.

“I’ll tell you what I am,” she said. “What I am is ashamed.”

She turned away quickly, giving my father an un
wanted glimpse of a perfectly rounded behind before she disappeared into the kitchen. The door closed and he heard her moving around behind it, heard what he was sure were muffled sobs.

His impulse was to follow her, to demand an ex
pla
nation, and, if that was necessary, to comfort her. In
stead, he strode to the closet, put on his coat and hat and left the apartment without another word.

He had no expectations as he clattered down the stairs, but, when he came to the bottom landing, there was the man who claimed to be his cousin, smoking a cigarette and faintly smirking.

“You’re a crazy man,” my father said.

“Sure, I’m crazy. Thinking you would loan me more money, that would be crazy.”

“Another loan?” My father was flabbergasted. “Is that what this is about? Money? You
are
crazy.”

“Sure, and you would have given it to me, just like that.”

“As a matter of fact, I would have,” my father said, although, afterwards, he wasn’t so sure.

“Just given it to me,” Reuben repeated, this time with considerable bitterness, “without making me beg like you did the last time.”

My father stared at the man for a moment, at his outstretched palm, then brushed past him, going through a doorway into a narrow outer hall with a filthy tile floor, then through a heavy door and onto a stoop. He stood on the top step for a moment, allowing his eyes to accustom themselves to the darkness, but he didn’t want to linger, should Reuben follow him. He plunged down the steps and headed towards the subway station. Around him, Brooklyn hunched like an animal, expectant.

•••

In the early months of World War II, when
The Day
was in its year-long strike and my father was working as a silversmith by day, driving cab at night, and he and my mother were afraid of losing the house they’d built in New Jersey, he went to his brother Henry for a loan. Years later, when he talked about this, he would mention that the sum was forty dollars – all he needed to make the difference between what he had and what he needed for that month’s mortgage payment.

Henry said no, offering money problems of his own as an excuse. This was my uncle Henry, my favourite uncle, whom my father had helped to put through law school, who, when I was older, used to pull pennies out of my ears, always had a joke and would gravely advise children to “follow your nose and you won’t get lost.” My father found the money elsewhere, and he did the next month and the month after, too, but eventually
they did lose the house, and they moved me, still an in
fant, and my sisters into a converted chicken coop not far away.

My father continued to be friendly with his brother, so, if he felt any resentment, he didn’t show it. Most likely, any resentment he might have felt would have been directed not at his brother but at himself, not at the one who turned him down but at the one who had
asked. Still, it grated him that his own brother had re
fused him such a small sum. “Forty dollars,” he would
say to me, with vehemence. Then, grinding out his cig
arette: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

“Shakespeare,” I would say.

“The Bible,” he’d reply, smiling. “That was one time the Bible got it right.”

• • •

Lettres d’amour

The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.
– Antoine Bret

My father, who was a newspaper reporter specializing in labour, was often sent out of town on assignments, usually to cover union conventions. In the first few years of their marriage, well before I was born, these separations, which would take him away for long weekends or even as much as a week, were especially hard on my mother, who had two young children to look after. This was in the Thirties, during the Depression,
and the conventions were mostly held in nearby At
lantic City or the Catskills or Poconos. Air travel was not yet popular for most people and the idea of having delegates from the New York and Philadelphia areas travel as far away as Florida was still unknown. “Who even heard of Florida anyway in those days?” my father would later ask. “Just a place for alligators.” But there was one extended trip, to Chicago, that took him away for almost two weeks in the spring of 1935, when my sisters were still quite small and my parents had been married recently enough that the length of the separation, for my mother at least, seemed excruciating.

Whenever my father went out of town, my mother wrote him letters, one a day. Usually, because he would only be gone a few days, she didn’t mail them – even in those days, when the mail was faster and more reliable than it is today, they wouldn’t have reached him in time. She wrote the letters, on sky-blue stationery and using a silver-tipped Shaeffer pen she’d won a
t college, folded
them neatly, inserted them into envelopes that she ad
dressed, in her precise, slanting hand, to “my darling Harry, care of the special place in my heart,” and tucked them away in the top drawer of their dresser, where she kept her jewelry box and other things of her own. When he came home, she’d present him with these letters, and he’d read them one a day for the next few days, as if they were actually arriving in the post.

“I bought Esther a new doll,” my mother would write, referring to my eldest sister, who was then around four, “and I’m dying to see how she likes it. I didn’t give it to her today because I wanted to wrap the box up pretty with paper and ribbons. In the morning, it’ll be sitting at her place on the breakfast table.”

“So how did Esther like the doll?” my father would ask, although he had, in fact, already seen his darling golden-haired daughter playing with it.

“I can’t tell you that,” my mother would tease. “You’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s letter.”

In one of these letters, which always contained words of endearment and longing, and often scraps of poetry, my mother closed with these words, “
Je t’aime
.” She had been born in Paris and
,
though her father, who was on the run from the czar’s secret police, took his
small family to England before she could speak, she al
ways said that French was her true tongue. She didn’t actually learn it until she was in college, but then it came to her as easily as if it had merely been forgotten. Still, she had only two years of study, and little chance to use it after she married my father, so she was far from fluent.

My father’s first languages had been Yiddish, which was still his working language, and Polish, long forgotten. He spoke English “like an American,” as he said, and could read bits of German, Latin and Greek, which he had taught himself, but could neither read nor speak any French. He knew the phrase she used, though, and he responded one day, when he had occasion to leave her a note, by concluding with another phrase he’d picked up: “
Je t’adore
.”